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BILL ROORBACH / Life Among Giants

Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - 7:30pm

Body:

Murder – lust – food – sports – greed - family – love:

don’t miss this
book!

It would be difficult to start a new year of fiction reading
with a better book than this wild, mesmerizing, unusual, gloriously written, thrilling,
and unforgettable train ride Bill Roorbach’s concocted in Life Among Giants.

At seventeen, David “Lizard” Hochmeyer is nearly seven feet
tall, a star quarterback, and Princeton-bound. His future seems all but assured
until his parents are mysteriously murdered, leaving Lizard and his older
sister, Kate, adrift and alone. Sylphide, the world’s greatest ballerina, lives
across the pond from their Connecticut home, in a mansion the size of a museum,
and it turns out that her rock star husband’s own disasters have intersected
with Lizard’s—and Kate’s—in the most intimate and surprising ways.

Over the decades that follow, Lizard and Kate are obsessed
with uncovering the motives behind the deaths, returning time and again to
their father’s missing briefcase, his shady business dealings and shaky
finances, and to Sylphide, who has threaded her way into Lizard’s and Kate’s
lives much more deeply than either had ever realized.

“Replete with all the stuff of
great page-turning pleasure: violent murder, illicit love, mysterious family
history. A story of extraordinary characters at the mercy of universal passions
and disappointments. A giant success.”

-- Antonya Nelson, author of Bound

A wildly entertaining novel of murder, seduction, and
revenge -- rich in incident, in expansiveness of character, and in lavishness
of setting -- it’s a Gatsby-esque adventure, a larger-than-life quest for
answers that reveals how sometimes the greatest mystery lies in knowing one’s
own heart.

Bill Roorbach is
the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including Writing Life
Stories: How to Make Memories Into Memoirs, Ideas Into Essays, and Life Into
Literature, Big
Bend, and The Smallest
Color. His work has been published in Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly,
Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, New York, and
dozens of other magazines and journals.